An Irish Airman foresees his Death

by W.B. Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

"This simple poem is one of Yeats’s most explicit statements about
the First World War, and illustrates both his active political
consciousness (“Those I fight I do not hate, / Those I guard I do not
love”) and his increasing propensity for a kind of hard-edged mystical
rapture (the airman was driven to the clouds by “A lonely impulse of
delight”). The poem, which, like flying, emphasizes balance, essentially
enacts a kind of accounting, whereby the airman lists every factor
weighing upon his situation and his vision of death, and rejects every
possible factor he believes to be false: he does not hate or love his
enemies or his allies, his country will neither be benefited nor hurt by
any outcome of the war, he does not fight for political or moral motives
but because of his “impulse of delight”; his past life seems a waste,
his future life seems that it would be a waste, and his death will
balance his life. Complementing this kind of tragic arithmetic is the
neatly balanced structure of the poem, with its cycles of alternating
rhymes and its clipped, stoical meter."